I’m experiencing a number of different issues. For one, the connection speed is wildly inconsistent. Sometimes I get 5mbps, other times I get under 1mbps. The connection is always dropping, and reconnecting. Sometimes it spends 30+ minutes disconnecting and reconnecting, before it finally gets a stable connection. Large downloads are constantly being interrupted because of the connection dropping.

This is crazy. I’m giving them another angry phone call on Monday.

There’s many different methods to use caching, with memcached. I call this one the Aggressive approach.

The basic logic is this: if you don’t even touch the database, you will be able to serve far more requests, than if you did. The biggest downside is, you can’t really do things too dynamically, and really, this only works well for flat pages (ie., it’s not for anything that displays content, based on the user).

In my case, I added the following code (shown as pseudo code) to the main/controller/dispatch script:

$memcache = new Memcache;
$memcache->connect(...);
$data = $memcache->get($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])

if ($data) {
    echo $data;
    die();
 }


$db = new PDO(...);
ob_start();
ob_implicit_flush(false);
...
... do whatever ...
...
$data = ob_get_contents();
$memcache->set($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], $data, 0, 3600);
ob_end_flush(); 

One of the biggest downsides to this approach, is figuring out how to delete cached objects when something’s updated. If you have a single table that holds the pages that you’re caching, however, you can just add a hook that deletes the cached object, by URI, when anything is written that would affect it.

This really doesn’t work well for anything super dynamic, but it’s great for increasing performance in areas that would otherwise waste resources.

Qwest finally got my Internet working, *phew*, after an agonizing 13 days. Now a new problem has reared it’s ugly head: My internet connection is ridiculously slow. I mean seriously slow. My gateway shows the downlink speed at 1100kbps. At my old apartment, it was usually around 6900. What’s worse: my actual connection speed is slower than what the gateway displays.

SpeedTest.net gives me an average of ~800kbps, just barely faster than my uplink speed! The meter jumped wildly between 1200kbps and 200kbps, during the test. This is absolutely ridiculous. I haven’t called yet, but I’m hoping it will end up being a simple fix. This whole experience has left me dismayed and flabbergasted. This is the first time I’ve ever considered Comcast as a serious alternative.

So, when it came time to move, I called Qwest to have them transfer my services. They were supposed to be setup when I arrived, and guess what… They weren’t. Not only that, but I had to wait on the phone for 2 hours, just to schedule them to come by, at their convenience, to fix the problem, while listening to “Your call is important to us”… Yeah right, more like your money is important to us.

Not only that, but it took them a week just to show up. Not only that, when they finally got around to hooking everything up, they routed me to the wrong ISP. And so here I am, waiting 10 days, and counting, for them to fix the problem. The only reason they can get away with this, is because they are a monopoly.